What you need to know
- The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced the launch of the Wi-Fi 6 certification program.
- Wi-Fi 6 or 802.11ax brings higher data rates, power efficiency improvements, as well as better performance in environments with many connected device.
- Flagship Android smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 series and Apple's new iPhone 11 lineup already support Wi-Fi 6.
The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced the launch of the Wi-Fi Certified 6 program based on the IEEE 802.11ax standard. Manufacturers can now send their products to be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, after which they will be able to use the Wi-Fi 6 certification badge on the product's packaging.
Manufacturers such as Samsung have already started highlighting the fact that their latest devices support the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard. Samsung's latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Note 10 is the world's first Wi-Fi Certified 6 smartphone. The Galaxy S10 series, which debuted earlier this year, also comes with Wi-Fi 6 support.
The new features and capabilities of the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard allow it to deliver maximum theoretical speeds of up to 9.6 Gbps, three times faster than the maximum theoretical speed supported by Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). More importantly, however, Wi-Fi 6 brings improved performance in environments with a large number of connected devices. Some of the advanced capabilities of the new Wi-Fi 6 standard include orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) and Multi-user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO).
While there aren't too many smartphones with Wi-Fi 6 supports on the market currently, we expect all future Android flagship phones to support the new standard. Existing devices, however, cannot receive Wi-Fi 6 certification as it requires new hardware.
